Law School Recruiting: Location, Location, Location

Law school recruiting season is in full swing. This means, not surprisingly, that our faculty is waiting to hear back from a candidate to whom we’ve extended a job offer. What’s the delay? As is often the case, when you’re recruiting to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, geography can be an significant issue. Many lawyers-turned-aspiring-profs make significant compromises – school quality, package, salary, etc – in order to land in a desirable city. This makes sense, but it is my impression – grounded only in anecdotes – that geography drives the hiring process more in law teaching than in other academic disciplines. Compared to law teaching candidates, aspiring liberal arts profs appear to weigh department quality more heavily, and geography less so.

If I’m right – and I’m curious whether others think I am – why is this so? Two reasons come to mind initially. First, those who attend graduate school for the express purpose of finding an academic job spend more time buying into the education hierarchy and coming to grips with the geographic compromises they are likely to face. Law teaching is often an afterthought for law students and, in any case, they certainly don’t spend three years kvetching about how they’ll have to move to Stillwater once they graduate.

Second, because profs in most fields make less than law profs, perhaps they prefer less popular (read: cheaper) locations. A salary of $35,000 a year gets you a good life in Tuscaloosa. In Boston, it buys a load of ramen.